WRITING THE RIVER

A professional development experience for teachers in the Lamoille River Watershed offered by Geoff Gevalt, Young Writers Project and Amy Demarest, Our Curriculum Matters.

What are the stories of the Lamoille River Watershed

that we should preserve, create and share with our communities? 

Join us in an exciting place-based 21^st century learning experience that involves your students in creating an authentic Web-based showcase for their work!

MEETING TIMES:

INTRODUCTION TO RIVER: 9am-4pm-Wednesday, August 18: Explore the Watershed

TECHNOLOGY BASICS WORKSHOP: 10am-2pm-Saturday, Sept 25 (YWP, Winooski)

CLASS MEETINGS THROUGHOUT YEAR: Workshop-style Collaborative Time

Click this player to see a four-minute movie created by students at Williston Central School about their Digital Writing Classroom which they named "We Write!" For more student and teacher comments about the Digital Writing Classrooms, click here or select "Testimonials" in the navigation bar above.

blog: a shared online journal where people post regular entries of creative work or journals about their personal experiences, opinions, observations and interests; postings are usually in a chronological order.

In a world dominated by digital technology, our students need to gain fluency in reading and writing via digital means. To be literate, engaged citizens, they need to be skilled users of the Internet, and strong communicators in a variety of media and situations. They need to become comfortable and skilled at keyboarding, and they need to develop a new range of literacies including media and digital. Even apart from the urgent need to help them learn to negotiate a complex, technology-driven world, we use digital forms of expression to improve the most basic skills of writing.  Blogging is a great way to work with students toward all of these goals.

Why comment?

YWP surveys have shown that:

Revision is the secret to great writing.

But few students understand that. Instead they lament that what they first write isn't perfect and wonderful and exactly the way they want. And, often, because the first draft is not, in their minds, "good" they often think they are not any good at writing.

So an important part of these Digital Writing Classrooms is introducing the concept and process of revision.

For instance, click on the "Revisions" tab at the top of this story and you will see prevision versions of this piece. In the YWP Digital Classroom, a teacher can see ALL revisions of ALL students' work but a student can ONLY see HIS/HER revisions. This is set up to allow teachers to communicate privately with a student: A teacher can edit a student's piece, insert comments and then unpublish it. (Whenever a teacher or a student edit's a piece, a new revision is automatically created that only the teacher and student can see.)

If you want your students to become better writers, authors, and communicators, then they need to be podcasting.

                                               -- Wesley Fryer

Multimedia writing uses a combination of text, still photographs, video clips, audio and graphics.  Its format is nonlinear, allowing the reader/viewer to choose how he or she will navigate through the various elements of a story.  The information presented in each medium is complementary, not redundant, so that different parts of the story are told using different media.

Using multimedia is a great way to engage students into many of the disciplines of writing, and YWP's Digital Writing Classrooms make it easy to do. It also often entices the less engaged student to participate. Among the attributes of a multimedia project are: